Mountain West is One of Two Conferences to Show Increase in Fans at Football Games

In a report put out by ESPN this week, statistics show that college football game attendance is, for some reason, on a downward trend over the last few years. But while most FBS and FCS games saw significant drops in average attendance, there are two conferences that actually had an increase in fans going to games this past season.

One of the conferences that saw an increase is the Mountain West, with an average of 832 more fans attending football games than in the prior year. Out of all the teams in the Mountain West division, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State and Utah State were all in the top 30 for increased attendance. I would bet that CSU's brand new, state-of-the-art, on-campus stadium has a little something to do with the higher number of game-goers, especially with the record-breaking crowd that came out for the home opener in August. The Big Ten was the only other conference to see a rise in fans at football games during the 2017 season.

Overall, the SEC, still had the largest average attendance of all conferences, bringing in nearly 75,074 fans per game. The SEC has led the country in fan attendance every year since 1998.